Answers
26 questions, answered in the first sentence
Every answer here is self-contained, carries its own scope, and is written to be quoted rather than skimmed. Numbers come from a live twelve-store deployment, 1–31 August 2026, unless stated otherwise.
What is Nexora?
Nexora is a restaurant operating platform for multi-unit operators, built to scale from 3 locations to 3,000. It joins the point of sale, the staff rota, the purchase ledger and the accounting feed into a single set of books, so an operator can see what a shift costs while it is still running rather than three weeks after the month closes. Nexora is not a point-of-sale system and not a payroll provider — it reads an existing POS and hands approved hours and labour cost to payroll.
What is prime cost in a restaurant?
Prime cost is a restaurant's cost of goods sold plus its total labour cost, divided by net sales, expressed as a percentage. It is the single ratio that most reliably predicts whether a location is profitable, because unlike rent or insurance both components are controllable week to week. Most operators target prime cost under 65%. Across a twelve-store group measured 1–31 August 2026, the best location ran 23.60% and the worst ran 75.84% on the same brand, the same menu and the same suppliers.
What is a good prime cost percentage for a restaurant?
Most full-service and fast-casual operators target a prime cost under 65% of net sales, with labour typically 25–30% and cost of goods making up the remainder. The target varies by format: a high-volume quick-service site with a low average check will usually run a lower labour percentage than a full-service restaurant. The more useful benchmark is your own best-performing location, because it already proves what is achievable on your menu and your suppliers.
Why is my restaurant's labour cost percentage wrong?
The most common cause is unmapped point-of-sale employees — people who clocked in on the till but were never linked to a record in your scheduling or reporting system. Their hours and cost reach no report, so the labour percentage you are shown is calculated on an incomplete set of hours and reads artificially low. In one twelve-store deployment, only 67.9% of worked hours carried a POS cost; 257 unmapped employees accounted for 1,253 unattributed hours in 90 days.
What is labour cost coverage?
Labour cost coverage is the share of hours actually worked that carry a cost in your reporting — costed hours divided by total hours worked. Below 100% means some employees exist on the point of sale but are not linked to a roster record, and their hours reach no report. It matters more than any other labour measure because it decides whether the rest are worth reading: missing hours make labour look lower, never higher, and nobody investigates a good number.
How do I compare prime cost across multiple restaurant locations?
Comparing prime cost across locations requires every store to be measured on identical definitions — the same treatment of discounts, comps, sales tax and which labour lines are included. A comparison view should place every location side by side on the same measures (orders, net sales, COGS, labour, prime cost percentage, sales per labour hour and average order value) and rank them, so the gap between the best and worst store is visible without reconciling twelve spreadsheets by hand. Where a store shows 0.00% labour, that is unmapped POS employees rather than efficiency.
What software shows restaurant labour cost before the schedule is published?
Nexora prices each shift as it is created — role, department, break and hourly rate resolved into a cost before the shift is saved, so a 7.5-hour shift at $15.00 an hour shows as $112.50 before it is published — and charges it against that store's weekly labour budget. It also names the individuals heading into overtime and prices the exposure before the rota is published rather than after payroll runs.
Does Nexora replace my POS?
No. Nexora reads an existing point-of-sale system and has no interest in replacing it. Changing POS is one of the most disruptive projects a restaurant group can undertake and it is not required to get value from Nexora.
Which point-of-sale systems does Nexora work with?
PAR is certified today and runs Nexora's live twelve-store pilot deployment. Beyond PAR the test is capability rather than brand: if a point of sale can export sales and timeclock data it can be connected, confirmed in writing before a customer commits. Groups running more than one POS across their estate — common after an acquisition — should say so before scoping, because reconciling two sets of definitions is the largest single variable in an implementation.
How does role-based access work in restaurant management software?
In Nexora, access is decided at sign-in rather than by hiding buttons: a session is bound to a role and a named list of stores before the page renders, so a store manager's session never queries the group's financials. There are three roles — super admin (global, full financial visibility), admin (an assigned region, operational figures including labour cost and overtime) and store manager (one store, full operating surface but no group financials or cost lines). Every grant, revocation and permission change is written to an audit log with timestamp and actor.
How does Nexora handle passwords?
It does not store any. Sign-in is by email address plus a six-digit one-time code sent to that address, exchanged for a session already scoped to the person's role and store list. Restaurant teams turn over quickly and share devices, and a password model in that environment reliably produces written-down credentials and shared logins — which makes an audit log fiction. Removing the password removes the artefact.
Can restaurant software read bank statements automatically?
Nexora reads uploaded bank statements line by line and proposes each charge as an expense against a chart-of-accounts category. Nothing posts automatically: extracted lines sit in a pending queue with their proposed category and account code, and a person approves, rejects or recodes each one before it reaches the P&L. Automated bookkeeping that posts itself is the version accountants reject.
What restaurant software works for franchise groups?
Franchise groups need two things most single-brand tools do not provide: identical P&L definitions across every location, and access scoping so a franchisee sees their own numbers and not their neighbour's. Nexora assigns role and store scope together, so a brand can be granted group-level reporting across the locations that have agreed to it and nothing from those that have not, while each franchisee retains a full operating view of their own stores.
How much does Nexora cost?
Nexora does not publish a price list. It is quoted against the estate — number of locations, how many point-of-sale systems are in use, headcount, and who needs to be reported to — after a 20-minute scoping call, with the figure confirmed in writing the same week. A four-store group on one POS and a twenty-store group carrying two POS systems and 300 unmapped employee records are not the same implementation, and a single published number would be wrong for both.
Is there a free trial of Nexora?
There is an evaluation tier, and it exists in the platform's own permission grid as a real scope rather than a sandbox of sample data. Its length and scope are agreed on the scoping call rather than fixed, for a specific reason: until a customer's POS is connected and their employees are mapped, every labour figure reads low, so a fixed fourteen-day clock that expires while credentials are still being chased tells the buyer nothing.
Is Nexora a mobile app?
Nexora is a responsive web application. It runs in a phone or tablet browser at the same address, with the same one-time-code sign-in and the same scope. There is no separate native app to install or update — which also means revoking someone's access in Command Center removes it everywhere at once, including the phone of someone who has left.
What is sales per labour hour?
Sales per labour hour is net sales divided by hours worked. It is the fairest way to compare a high-volume site with a low average check against a low-volume site with a high one, because labour percentage alone flatters whichever has the higher check. Across a twelve-store group in August 2026 the estate ran $45.57 per labour hour, with individual stores ranging from $23.69 to $267.70 — and the extreme high was unmapped employees rather than exceptional productivity.
What is schedule health in restaurant scheduling?
Schedule health is a single graded score for a scheduled period, weighted toward overtime risk and shown with the deductions per store rather than only the total. That is what makes it actionable: in a twelve-store estate graded C overall, the score made it immediately clear which single location was responsible for most of the shortfall, instead of hiding it inside an estate-wide average.
How do I reduce overtime across multiple restaurant locations?
Overtime in a multi-unit group is rarely scheduled deliberately — it accumulates across a week nobody is totalling, and across locations nobody is totalling together. A person working four shifts at one store and two at another is over 40 hours in law and under 40 in each store's own report. The fix is a single roster of record across every location, thresholds visible mid-week rather than at payroll, and the exposure priced before the rota is published: one twelve-store estate carried a material, avoidable overrun in a single period.
What is a tip credit and how does it affect labour cost?
A tip credit lets an employer pay tipped staff a lower cash wage, with tips making up the difference to the minimum. It changes restaurant labour cost structurally rather than marginally: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington permit no tip credit at all, so locations there will always show a higher labour percentage than locations in tip-credit states, whatever the management. Comparing the two on labour percentage alone will always flatter the tip-credit state.
What is daily overtime and which states have it?
Daily overtime is overtime owed after a set number of hours in a single day, not only after 40 in a workweek — Alaska, California, Colorado and Nevada apply it. A scheduling system that totals only weekly hours will miss it entirely, so a double shift covering a call-out can trigger overtime in a week that never reaches 40 hours, and it surfaces at payroll after every hour has been worked.
Does Nexora replace my accountant?
No, and most customers keep theirs. Nexora produces a store-level P&L from POS sales and expense data — gross sales through sales tax, discounts, COGS, gross profit and operating expenses to EBITDA and net income — which turns the monthly close into a confirmation rather than a revelation. It is not a general-ledger accounting package and it does not file anything.
What does Nexora not do?
Nexora is not a point of sale, not a payroll provider and not a general-ledger accounting package. It does not count stock on hand — its in-hand figure is an estimate derived from purchases and sales, and the product labels it as such. A handful of secondary modules are still in build, and the product marks them as such on the screen rather than hiding the gap.
How does an AI assistant inside restaurant software actually help?
The barrier to a busy operator using any reporting tool is knowing which screen a number lives on. NexAI is a question box over the operator's own data: ask what total expenses were last month, which store had the highest labour cost this week, or for the top five expense categories this quarter, and it answers from the ledger and then draws the breakdown behind the figure. It is scoped to the same entitlement as the session, so it cannot answer from data the person is not permitted to see.
How long does it take to get useful numbers out of a restaurant operating platform?
The gating task is not configuration, it is point-of-sale employee mapping — and it is an afternoon for most groups. Until it is done, labour cost coverage sits below 100% and every labour ratio reads low, which is why a platform should show the coverage percentage and tell the operator not to trust the labour figures yet. Most groups start with two or three locations, prove the numbers reconcile against their POS and their accountant, then add the rest.
What should a restaurant group ask any software vendor before connecting their POS?
Four questions, and the answers should be in writing: where the data is hosted and by whom; the retention and deletion terms after termination; the data-handling and model-training position; and the support response targets. A fifth is worth adding for multi-unit groups — whether access scope is enforced at authentication or only in the interface, because interface-level hiding does not survive someone typing a URL directly.
Where these numbers come from
Pilot figures are read from the live product for the period stated — principally 1–31 August 2026 across twelve stores. They are a snapshot: POS and expense data continued to land during the period, so the same measure captured a few days apart will differ. Wage and hour figures are from the US Department of Labor's state minimum wage and tipped employee tables, effective 1 July 2026, and are not legal advice. No customer result is published without a named customer who has approved it in writing.
Glossary of every measure, with formulas → · What Nexora is and is not →
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